Tackling variability: A multicenter study to provide a gold-standard network approach for frontotemporal dementia.

摘要: Biomarkers represent a critical research area in neurodegeneration disease as they can contribute to studying potential disease-modifying agents, fostering timely therapeutic interventions, and alleviating associated financial costs. Functional connectivity (FC) analysis represents promising approach identify early biomarkers specific diseases. Yet, virtually no study has tested whether FC prove be reliable reproducible across different centers. As such, their implementation remains uncertain due multiple sources of variability studies: the numerous international centers capable conducting vary scanning equipment samples’ socio-cultural background, and, more troublingly still, gold-standard method exists analyze FC. In this unprecedented study, we aim address both issues by performing first multicenter behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), assessing approaches propose for analysis. We enrolled 52 bvFTD patients 60 controls from three clinics (with fMRI recording parameters), additional neurological patient groups. To evaluate FC, focused on seed analysis, inter-regional connectivity, several graph-theory approaches. Only based weighted-matrices, yielded consistent differences between Also, graph metrics robustly discriminated other conditions. The consistency our findings heterogeneous contexts highlights brain network bvFTD. Hum Brain Mapp, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.